"And . . ." George begins again. "Why are you all looking at me like
that?"
Cara steps forward, about to bear the bad news, but I can't imagine Cara sharing it well, so I get up, talking over her.
"Your sister did leave with us," I say. "But we were attacked by the factionless, and she . . . didn't make it."
There is so much that phrase doesn't say—how quick it was, and the sound of her body hitting the earth, and the chaos of everyone running into the night, stumbling over the grass. I didn't go back for her. I should have—of all the people in our party, I knew Tori best, knew how tightly her hands squeezed the tattoo needle and how her laugh sounded rough, like it had been scraped with
sandpaper.
George touches the wall behind him for stability. "What?"
"She gave her life defending us," Tris says with surprising gentleness. "Without her, none of us would have made it out."
"She's . . . dead?" George says weakly. He leans his entire body into the wall, and his shoulders sag.
I see Amar in the hallway, a piece of toast in his hand and a smile quickly fading from his face. He sets the toast down on a table by the door.
"I tried to find you earlier to tell you," Amar says.
Last night Amar said George's name so casually, I didn't think they really knew each other. Apparently they do.
George's eyes turn glassy, and Amar pulls him into an embrace with one arm. George's fingers are bent at harsh angles into Amar's shirt, the knuckles white with tension. I don't hear him cry, and maybe he doesn't, maybe all he needs to do is hold on to something. I have only hazy memories of my own grief over my mother, when I thought she was dead— just the feeling that I was separate from everything around me, and this constant sensation of needing to swallow something. I don't know what it's like for other people.
Eventually, Amar leads George out of the room, and I watch them walk down the hallway side by side, talking in low voices.
I barely remember that I agreed to participate in a genetic test until someone else appears at the door to the dormitory—a boy, or not really a boy, since he looks about as old as I am. He waves to Tris.
"Oh, that's Matthew," she says. "I guess we should get going."
She takes my hand and leads me toward the doorway. Somehow I missed her mentioning that "Matthew" wasn't a crusty old scientist. Or maybe she didn't mention it at all.
Don't be stupid, I think.
Matthew sticks out his hand. "Hi. It's nice to meet you. I'm Matthew."
"Tobias," I say, because "Four" sounds strange here, where people would never identify themselves by how many fears they have. "You too."
"So let's go to the labs, I guess," he says. "They're this way."
The compound is thick with people this morning, all dressed in green or dark blue uniforms that pool around the ankles or stop several inches above the shoe, depending on the height of the person. The compound is full of open areas that branch off the major hallways, like chambers of a heart, each marked with a letter and a number, and the people seem to be moving between them, some carrying glass devices like the one Tris brought back this morning, some empty-handed.
"What's with the numbers?" says Tris. "Just a way of labeling each area?"
"They used to be gates," says Matthew. "Meaning that each one has a door and a walkway that led to a particular airplane going to a particular destination. When they converted the airport into the compound, they ripped out all the chairs people used to wait for their flights in and replaced them with lab equipment, mostly taken from schools in the city. This area of the compound is basically a giant laboratory."
"What are they working on? I thought you were just observing the experiments," I say, watching a woman rush from one side of the hallway to the other with a screen balanced on both palms like an offering. Beams of light stretch across the polished tile, slanting through the ceiling windows. Through the windows everything looks peaceful, every blade of grass trimmed and the wild trees swaying in the distance, and it's hard to imagine that people are destroying one another out there because of "damaged genes" or living under Evelyn's strict rules in the city we